ABSTRACT: (for the talk by Jeremy Koons). Wilfrid Sellars was ambivalent as to the prospects of deriving the “reality…of an ethical community consisting of all rational beings” (SM 7.XX.144/p. 225), and hence vindicating the moral point of view—and particularly ambivalent that the moral point of view could be rationally justified vis-à-vis rational egoism (RE). Sellars’s ambivalence reflects a common set of assumptions in analytic philosophy: either (a) that the moral point of view stands in opposition to self-interest, or (b) that the moral point of view must be justified by appeal to self-interest. I think the prospects are rosier than he anticipated, and set out to prove the reality of this community—and hence to vindicate the moral point of view. I argue that rational egoism (RE) cannot be established just by considering the nature of practical reason. Nor does RE embody the most plausible theory of the good: an agent cannot consistently hold that her welfare is the only good (for her). I will argue that central elements of rational agency are constituted by collective attitudes, which essentially depend on the community, its practices, and its attitudes. Thus, rational agency itself cannot be understood apart from the community. Nor can the agent’s welfare, autonomy, or other essential goods or capabilities—indeed, various essential elements of her identity. Thus, there is no meaningful way to argue that an agent’s well-being matters, but the welfare of the community—that (partially) constitutes her agency, her welfare, and so on—does not matter.

Support for this workshop is provided by Lucas Thorpe’s TÜBİTAK project “Concepts and Beliefs: From Perception to Action” ( 114K348) and the joint Boğaziçi -Southampton Newton-Katip Çelebi project AF140071 “Agency and Autonomy: Kant and the Normative Foundations of Republican Self-Government” run by Lucas Thorpe (Boğaziçi) and Andrew Stephenson (Southampton) and Lucas Thorpe’s BAP project 9320.

Embodied Agency

Boğaziçi University

Friday and Saturday (1-2/12/2017)

Philosophy Department

John Freely building, room 507-8

This workshop is organized around a book manuscript by Hong Yu Wong which will be published by Oxford University Press. If you would like to receive a copy of the manuscript in advance of the workshop, please email conceptsandbeliefs@gmail.com

Talk by Saniye Vatansever (Yeditepe University) at Koç University on “KANT’S RESPONSE TO HUME IN THE SECOND ANALOGY: A CRITIQUE OF BUCHDAHL’S AND FRIEDMAN’S ACCOUNTS”

Date: 7 November, Tuesday, 2017

Time: 10:30-12:00

Place: SOS 277,

Title: “KANT’S RESPONSE TO HUME IN THE SECOND ANALOGY: A CRITIQUE OF BUCHDAHL’S AND FRIEDMAN’S ACCOUNTS”

Abstract: While commentators mostly agree that in the Second Analogy Kant responds to the “Humean problem,” there is not yet an agreement on exactly which Humean problem he aims to solve and what the argument establishes have not yet been agreed upon. L.W. Beck, Gerd Buchdahl, Graham Bird and Henry Allison, among others, argue that the Second Analogy addresses Hume’s “problem of causation,” which is a problem concerning the justification of the concept of causation and the Causal Principle. In this paper, I focus particularly on Buchdahl’s interpretation of the Second Analogy, to which I refer as the “modest reading” because on his reading the Second Analogy has a modest goal of solving only Hume’s problem of causation. In response to Buchdahl’s modest reading, Michael Friedman, among others, argue for the “strong reading” of the Second Analogy, according to which Kant addresses not only Hume’s problem of causation, but also the problem of induction. In fact, Friedman claims that Kant’s main objective in the Second Analogy is to solve Hume’s problem of induction, which requires an a priori justification of the principle of the uniformity of nature. Contra these two popular readings, which view the Second Analogy as addressing one or the other of the Humean problems, I argue that the Second Analogy achieves more than addressing the problem of causation, and yet falls short of solving the problem of induction. The alternative reading I offer contains in the following three theses (i) the Second Analogy argument proves both the necessity of the Causal Principle and the existence of its particular determinations, i.e., necessary empirical causal laws; (ii) contra Buchdahl and Friedman, empirical laws express two different kinds of necessity which are not reducible to each other; and finally, (iii) even though the Second Analogy guarantees the existence of (necessary and strictly universal) empirical laws, it does not guarantee the uniformity of nature, which in turn means that the Second Analogy argument falls short of addressing Hume’s problem of induction.

Our Cogsci/Philosophy reading group this semester will take place on Mondays from 5-7pm at Boğaziçi in JF507.

We will begin the semester this coming Monday (25/09/2017) and will start reading Susan Carey‘s book The Origin of Concepts. This coming week we will discuss chapters one and two. And we plan to continue with this book for at least the first 4 weeks of the semester. Everyone is welcome.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list, or an electronic copy of the text, please email Duygu at: conceptsandbeliefs@gmail.com

Support for this reading group is provided by Lucas Thorpe’s TÜBİTAK project “Concepts and Beliefs: From Perception to Action” ( 114K348).

Support for this conference was provided by Funding for this Workshop was provided by the joint Boğaziçi -Southampton Newton-Katip Çelebi project AF140071 “Agency and Autonomy: Kant and the Normative Foundations of Republican Self-Government” run by Lucas Thorpe (Boğaziçi) and Sasha Mudd (Southampton)